IX
Itwas late that evening before Faunce left the house. As the door finally closed behind him, a biting wind drove the first flakes of a snow-storm into his face. The touch of it, the sting of ice on his flushed cheek, roused him.
He had been, for a while, like a man in a trance, who sees through the golden mist the beautiful shapes of an Elysian vision, and hears the heavenly music of the spheres, while he lies there powerless alike to grasp the full joy of his translation or to confess his own unworthiness to bask in its heavenly sunshine. Only a moment before he had held Diane in his arms, the soft touch of her cheek was still warm on his, the fragrance of her shadowy hair lay still upon his shoulder; yet he felt the intensity of his moral solitude, the depth of the gulf that yawned between her warm faith in him and his hidden shame.
His love for her, his firm determination to wrest happiness from the depths of his misery—the primal instincts of a nature that could not resist temptation—had driven him on. He had won her; however reluctant, however spiritually blinded she had been to his moral attributes, shehad promised to be his wife. But his triumph was short-lived, for he knew already that his joy was like a beautiful, shimmering bubble, dancing before the wind. In an instant it would break, and his outstretched hand would grasp only the empty air.
A moment before he had been so happy, so passionately confident that his soul had at last risen above its dishonor. With the assurance of Diane’s love, he could shake off the shackles of fear and rise to such heights of courage, to such magnificent security, that not even the clutching hands of the Furies who had pursued him day and night could drag him down.
A moment ago—how different it had been! He thought of the warm old room with its mellowed air of age and comfort, the dark rug on the floor, the fire sparkling on the hearth, the somber but beautiful hangings, the few fine pictures—a Gainsborough that an ancestral Herford had brought from England as a family treasure, a small Greuze head, and a simple but lovely landscape by an American painter, who had loved the shaded dell and the dashing waterfall. He could see again the table with the lamp, the carved armchairs, and the figure of Diane in a pale house-gown that she had worn at dinner, its simple folds revealing the long, dryadlike lines of her slender form and the buoyant grace of her easy pose as she stood there, beside her own hearthstone, talking to him.
The kindled loveliness of her eyes haunted him still. He had held her soft hands in his, and had felt the tremulous touch of her lips, believing himself one with the immortal lovers of old; but now the door had closed on him, and the night, wild and wintry and touched with snow, had engulfed him. He shuddered awake from his dream of bliss, and saw himself as a lost soul at the gate of paradise.
That was his fate. Happiness might be within his grasp, but it would elude him and mock him. He might attain, but he could never possess. A power greater than life itself had laid hold upon him, an invisible force was crushing him down, and his soul, like the proverbial candle in the wind, only leaped and flickered at the mercy of the gale.
A driving snow-storm swept across the open country, and the trees creaked and swayed in the tempest; but he walked on. The very tumult of it seemed to submerge the still more cruel tumult in his soul, and he breasted the rising storm with something akin to joy that there was endurance enough left in him to face it. For the time the need of physical exertion relieved his mental tension.
Leaving the highroad and climbing to the summit of a little hill, he stood looking down upon the distant city, shrouded in fog and cloaked in blinding snow, until its lights seemed to blend intogigantic arches and semicircles, like broken rainbows in a bank of vapor. It was a familiar spectacle; he had seen it often before, but never in an aspect quite like this.
The strange effect of the lights in the sky, together with the snowflakes that were driving into his face and whitening his arms and shoulders, recalled the frozen wastes of the polar ice-fields, the curtain of deathlike fog that hung over those bleak solitudes. He remembered Diane’s words, her faith in his high endeavor, her hope that he would complete his task and win, at last, a certain claim to the glory that was now but the fallen mantle of a greater man.
He must go back! He recalled the impulse that had been so overwhelming, the keen desire to return. It had seemed to him sometimes as if unseen hands had grasped him and were drawing him back to those haunted seas. Diane had voiced his feeling; she, too, had urged him to go.
But now, alone in the night, he fell into one of his bitter moments of revulsion. The whole thing filled him with horror. It was strange, he told himself, that she should so insist upon it. It was unlike a woman to bid her lover go into such perils. He began to believe that she did not love him—it was Overton still who stood between! Jealousy laid hold of him and rent him.
A prey to contending feelings, he turned and fought again with the gale, plunging on into thedrifting snow. She had told him that she loved Overton. He was second in her heart, second in the great expedition, second in the very honors he had won!
Yet—a shudder ran through him—what right had he to be jealous of Overton? What right had he, indeed, to any honor, or to high repute, or to Diane’s love? An hour before he had lifted the cup of life to his lips and tasted joy; now he was draining the bitter dregs in a spiritual agony that laid bare his own soul.
He saw his course, as he had followed it in the long year that was drawing now to its close; and it was plain to him why the thought of it had haunted him night after night, even when he had tried to shut it out, until insomnia had driven him to the verge of madness. Like Orestes, he had been pursued by the Furies; but no tribunal of the gods would release him from their clutches. He could never sleep again without the deadly poison of some narcotic stealing into his veins.
He had walked blindly, without following the road, and he was almost out of his reckoning when, through the white folds of the storm, he saw the outlines of the Gerry house set low and solid amid its clustering cedars. A light burned in two windows in the rear, showing that Dr. Gerry was still up, keeping his usual vigil in his study. The fact that the rest of the house was dark suggestedthat the household slept, and that the doctor was alone.
Faunce paused in his struggle with the wind and stood staring at the light. Again he was swept with an unaccountable impulse to cry aloud for help, to strip the veil from his soul, after the manner of those desperate ones who snatch at the wild hope that some other mortal may be able to apply a panacea that shall stay the devouring agony, heal the secret wound, before the sufferer bleeds to death.
As he stood there, uncertain, torn by his fears and his doubts, voices seemed to speak to him in the fury of the elements. As the storm beat upon him, he felt an unseen presence pressing against his garments. The Furies again pursued him!
He had reached the limit of his endurance. He pressed his hands over his eyes; and then, as he looked up, he saw a white world and a leaden sky. The horrible illusion was complete; his fate had overtaken him again, and he could not resist it. Trembling from head to foot, stricken with an overwhelming horror and dismay, he turned and made his way through the drifted snow to the old house, climbed the short flight of front steps, and knocked at the office door.
The doctor himself appeared in answer to the summons.
“Is that you, Faunce?” he asked, holding open the door. “I expected you—come in.”
But the words fell on deaf ears. Faunce did not apparently heed them as he entered, still dazed by the long struggle with the storm, and his tall figure whitened with snow. He suffered himself to be stripped of his greatcoat and ordered to a seat by the fire.
The warmth of the room, the glow of the lamplight, the familiar aspect of the place, lined as it was with the doctor’s books and medicine cabinets, the slight aromatic odor of drugs that pervaded it, awoke him from his stupor. He leaned forward, and, stretching his hands out to the blaze, stared steadily into it.
The doctor, who had been watching him from the first, poured some cognac into a glass and brought it.
“You’d better drink that,” he advised gruffly. “Been trying to kill yourself?”
Faunce took the glass, drained it, and set it down on the table.
“No,” he replied in a low voice. “I don’t want to die. There’s nothing I dread more than death. I’ve always had a kind of physical abhorrence of it.”
His host quietly resumed his own seat on the opposite side of the fire.
“Most strong young men have a horror of it,” he remarked dryly, “as well as some old ones.”
Faunce looked up at him with a dazed face.
“Have you ever been afraid—mortally afraid to die?” he asked hoarsely.
Gerry shook his head.
“I never had time.”
“Then you can’t understand!”
The exclamation was almost a cry. It seemed to be wrung from some agonized inner consciousness that had escaped his control, for Faunce leaned back in his chair, gripping the arms with his strong, nervous hands, and a slow, deep flush mounted over his pale face.
The doctor refilled his old pipe and lit it with elaborate preoccupation.
“Was that what ailed you down there at the pole?” he asked between whiffs.
Faunce, fully roused, started.
“How do you know that anything ailed me? Why have you hung on to that idea?”
“Because I’ve seen—for one thing—that you’ve got something on your mind. I told you so before.”
“And your theory is that—if I get it off—I’ll get rest?”
The doctor nodded.
Faunce rose from his chair and began to walk the floor, his arms hanging at his sides, his head bent. As he walked, he clenched and unclenched his fingers. Dr. Gerry followed the younger man with his eyes, but continued to pull away at his pipe, the intimate of his solitude. He noticed,too, in his cool, observing way, that the cat avoided his nervous visitor, rising from his path with elevated back and moving to a place of security beside the hearth.
The doctor bent down and threw a log upon the fire. The sound of its fresh crackling brought Faunce back.
“By Jove, you’re right!” he said harshly. “I have got something on my mind!”
The doctor smiled grimly. Faunce dropped into his seat and, leaning forward, laid his hand on the older man’s knee.
“Do you know that this afternoon, after I saw you go, I asked Diane Herford to marry me?”
Gerry took his pipe out of his mouth and laid it down.
“You had no business to do it!” he retorted sharply. “You’re a dope-fiend already; what right have you to ask any woman to trust a man who can’t sleep without chloral?”
“Chloral?” Faunce swept that aside with a gesture of contempt. “That’s nothing—compared with the rest!”
The doctor eyed him, looking at him from under heavy brows. He saw the mounting passion in the other man’s mood, and waited. After a moment Faunce went on.
“I’ve been in hell for the last few hours! I’ve lived in it for months, or I thought I had; but the last of it has been too much! But I won’t giveher up—I wouldn’t give her up if Overton came back from the dead!”
He stopped and sat staring in front of him, his face distorted with emotion. The doctor, watching his visitor narrowly, nodded his head.
“Ah!” he commented slowly. “It’s Overton, then, who’s on your mind?”
Faunce turned and met Gerry’s eyes.
“Yes, it’s Overton!” he flung back. “You’ve read my book and his journal—you’ve read the story of the expedition?”
“I’ve read all that you let us read. I got an impression that you’d cut out a good deal.”
“Yes; I cut out a good deal. Do you remember the description of the loss of the ship? We had to take to the ice-fields, then, with the men and the dogs. You know the rest. The progress we made, our comparative success, and the shelter for the men—the cache that saved us? Then you remember that Overton, Rayburn, and I set out with one sled and some provisions to make a dash for the pole? How the storm overtook us, Rayburn and Overton died from exposure, and I was barely saved?”
The doctor nodded in an absent way, taking up his pipe, which he had let go out, and emptying it, without again looking in the direction of his guest. In a subconscious way, however, he was recalling Faunce as he stood on the steps with Diane, young, handsome, flushed with hope.
“It’s all of it true, yet there’s more behind—more that I couldn’t tell. I never meant to tell it at all, but there’s something, some power inside of us, or above us, that drags things out. I don’t know what fiend it is, but it has pursued me night and day!”
“Some of us call it conscience,” remarked the doctor dryly.
“Call it by any name you choose, it has mastered me, broken me on the wheel!” Faunce paused again; then he collected his thoughts, and went on in a voice so level and cold that it seemed impossible that he was telling a story of his own life. “It’s true that we set out together, and it’s true that Rayburn died of exposure. By that time the storm had cut us off, and we were lost in that cruel wilderness of ice. We buried Rayburn in a drift, Overton repeating what he could remember of the burial service, the storm beating on us and the dogs howling against our feet. Then we pushed on. To stop was death, and we thought we could find the others. They were in the dugout, and had food enough; but we had been delayed by Rayburn, for Overton wouldn’t leave him until he was buried in the snow, and the blizzard had increased. In the midst of it Overton broke his ankle. We had only one sled, so I put him on it, and we pushed on. The food was gone—he had given the last of it to the dogs.
“About this time he began to get like Rayburn—outof his head. I suppose his leg pained him, and he was exhausted. The wind kept howling over the ice, and the cold had frozen straight through my clothing. It seemed to be in my bones, it numbed my very soul. I had no feeling except the desire to live, to escape! But I felt that I was going—going the way Rayburn had gone, the way Overton was surely going. I could feel a kind of madness creeping into my blood. I began to be afraid of death. There was nothing there but blinding ice and snow and the screech of the wind. It sounded as if the Furies were let loose. Once I thought I saw figures in the distance, that help was near; but it was the mirage, and I fancied I was going crazy. I saw, too, that Overton was failing fast. It came over me then that I should die, too, like that! We had to stop to rest the dogs, and I gave him the last pull out of my flask; but he lay in a stupor in the snow. The dogs began to howl. I was born in the country, and I’ve heard it said, when I was a boy, that a dog’s howl meant death. It made me furious, and I remember that I struck at the poor brutes. The cold was fiendish. I could scarcely breathe the freezing air. Overton became unconscious, and didn’t answer me.”
For a moment Faunce stopped, breathing hard.
“I was seized with a sickening fear,” he went on. “I shook—not with cold, but with terror. I tried to lift him on the sled again, but I was nolonger strong enough, and it terrified me still more to find that my strength was failing. He was as helpless as a log of wood, and I heard the howl of the rising gale. If I stayed there, in twelve hours, in less than twelve hours, I should be like him, or worse! I couldn’t face it; it wasn’t human to face it!”
Faunce stopped again, and then went on in a monotonous voice:
“I didn’t look at him again. I got on the sled and made the dogs drag me away. I had to whip them; they didn’t want to leave him. We went a long way before we struck the trail, and as we did so another storm, worse than the first, broke; but the dugout was in sight, the men saw us, and I was saved.”
“And you left Overton out there—alone—in that waste—alive?”
“Yes!”